Learning a language is one thing and memorising an illogical system of visual images—­for that is what reading ordinary English spelling comes to—­is quite another.  A man can learn to play first chess and then bridge in half the time that these two games would require if he began by attempting simultaneous play, and exactly the same principle applies to the language problem.

These considerations lead on to the idea of a special development or sub-species of the English language for elementary teaching and foreign consumption.  It would be English, very slightly simplified and regularised, and phonetically spelt.  Let us call it Anglo-American.  In it the propagandist power, whatever that power might be, state, university or association, would print not simply, instruction books but a literature of cheap editions.  Such a specialised simplified Anglo-American variety of English would enormously stimulate the already wide diffusion of the language, and go far to establish it as that lingua franca of which the world has need.

And in the same way, the phonetic alphabet adopted as the English medium could be used as the medium for instruction in French, where, as in the British Isles, Canada, North and Central Africa, and large regions of the East, it is desirable to make an English-speaking community bi-lingual.  At present a book in French means nothing to an uninstructed Englishman, an English book conveys no accurate sound images to an uninstructed Frenchman.  On the other hand, a French book printed on a proper phonetic system could be immediately read aloud—­though of course it could not be understood—­by an uninstructed Englishman.  From the first he would have no difficulties with the sounds.  And vice versa.  Such a system of books would mean the destruction of what are, for great masses of French and English people, insurmountable difficulties on the way to bi-lingualism.  Its production is a task all too colossal for any private publishers or teachers, but it is a task altogether trivial in comparison with the national value of its consequences.  But whether it will ever be carried out is just one of those riddles of the jumping cat in the human brain that are most perplexing to the prophet.

The problem becomes at once graver, less hopeful, and more urgent when we take up the case of Russian.  I have looked closely into this business of Russian teaching, and I am convinced that only a very, very small number of French-and English-speaking people are going to master Russian under the existing conditions of instruction.  If we Westerns want to get at Russia in good earnest we must take up this Russian language problem with an imaginative courage and upon a scale of which at present I see no signs.  If we do not, then the Belgians, French, Americans and English will be doing business in Russia after the war in the German language—­or through a friendly German interpreter.  That, I am afraid, is the probability of the case.  But it need not be the case.  Will and intelligence could alter all that.